1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to connectors, electronic equipment, and information processing units, and more particularly to a connector installed on electronic equipment, the electronic equipment incorporating electronic components, for example, a storage medium such as a hard disk or a semiconductor memory, and attachable to and removable from a main apparatus such as a personal computer, and an information processing unit.
2. Description of the Related Art
A portable notebook-sized personal computer has been brought into practical use by small sizing and high performance formation of components.
Further, there have currently increased the number of people who own a desktop personal computer and the notebook-sized personal computer in an office, and a plurality of personal computers in homes. For that reason, there have occurred needs for intended to manage unitarily data stored in a hard disk in the personal computer, or for intended to carry data having a large capacity.
Furthermore, since a digital camera and a digital video camera have been used widely, data amounts of digital data have increased considerably, and there has occurred a problem that a storage capacity of the hard disk is liable to be filled with data immediately.
Meanwhile, the storage capacity of a hard disk has been rapidly increased every year, so that there has increased needs for intending to exchange an old hard disk having small storage capacity to a new hard disk having large storage capacity.
In order to meet these needs, there has been proposed a removable hard disk to be easily portable and easily exchangeable.
However, when the removable hard disk is removed from such as the personal computer, since a user manually performs attaching and removing the hard disk to/from the personal computer, if for some reason the hard disk should be detached from the personal computer during access, which might lead to such a possibility that data in the hard disk have been broken and the entire important data have been disappeared.
In addition, there is a request that the removable hard disk is automatically removed from such as the personal computer similar to that of a VTR cassette tape.
Consequently, in order to solve these problems and request, there has been proposed a mechanism (auto-loading mechanism) for automatically removing the removable hard disk by only pushing a switch.
However, in a removable hard disk apparatus, since there is exposed a connector portion for electrically connecting to a main frame apparatus such as the personal computer, there has been a concern that adhesion of dust and static electricity exert an adverse effect on data in a hard disk.
For that reason, although consideration is made on constitution for covering the connector portion by a shutter, in anyway, a method for realizing the auto-loading mechanism with simple constitution has been expected.
Further, it has been desired that a shutter be constituted so that it never opens unintentionally.